writing

writ·ing

a. The act or process of producing and recording words in a form that can be read and understood: At first, most students find writing difficult.

b. The occupation or style of someone who writes, especially for publication.

2. Written form: Put it in writing.

3. Handwriting; penmanship: writing that has many flourishes.

4. Something written, especially:

a. Meaningful letters or characters that constitute readable matter: erased the writing on the blackboard.

b. A written work, especially a literary composition: collected all the author's writings.

5. Writings(used with a sing. or pl. verb)Bible The third of the three divisions of the Hebrew Scriptures, composed of Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Solomon, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles. See Table at Bible.

writing

(ˈraɪtɪŋ)

n

1. (Letters of the Alphabet (Foreign)) a group of letters or symbols written or marked on a surface as a means of communicating ideas by making each symbol stand for an idea, concept, or thing, by using each symbol to represent a set of sounds grouped into syllables (syllabic writing), or by regarding each symbol as corresponding roughly or exactly to each of the sounds in the language (alphabetic writing). See also ideogram

Writing

1. the use of a symbol to represent phonetically the initial sound (syllable or letter) of the name of an object, as A is the flrst sound of Greek alpha.2. the use of the name of the object as the name of the symbol representing its initial sound, as A in Greek is called alpha “ox.” Also called acrophony. — acrologic, adj.

1. the art of beautiful penmanship.2. handwriting in general.3. good handwriting skills. Cf. cacography.4. a script of a high aesthetic value produced by brush, especially that of Chinese, Japanese, or Arabic origin. — calligrapher, calligraphist, n. — calligraphic, calligraphical, adj.

1. the penmanship of a person, especially when used in an important document, as in an apostolic letter written and signed by the pope.2. the art of beautiful penmanship; calligraphy. — chirograph, chirographer, n. — chirographic, chirographical, adj.

1. the science or study of secret writing, especially code and cipher systems.2. the procedures and methods of making and using secret languages, as codes or ciphers. — cryptographer, cryptographist, n. — cryptographic, cryptographical, cryptographal, adj.

a form of writing regarded as midway between picture writing, as hieroglyphics, and phonetic writing in which the names of the symbols are not the names of the objects they depict but phonetic elements only. — iconomatic, adj.

1. an alphabetical script originally used for inscriptions in the Irish language from the 5th to the 10th centuries.2. any of the 20 characters of this script.3. an inscription in this script. — oghamist, ogamist, n.

1. ancient forms of writing, as in inscriptions, documents, and manuscripts.2. the study of ancient writings, including decipherment, translation, and determination of age and date. — paleographer, palaeographer, n. — paleographic, palaeographic, adj.

the transmission of writing or drawing such that the movements of the receiving pen copy those of the transmitting pen or pencil, yielding a facsimile reproduction at the receiving end. — telautograph, n. — telautographic, adj.

Writers/Writing

The act of writing itself is done in secret, like masturbation —Stephen King

Alliteration is like ivy, some of it is poison —Delmore Schwartz

As a baker bakes more bread than brown; or as a tumbler tumbles up and down; so does our author, rummaging his brain, by various methods try to entertain —Henry Fielding

An author at work is like an oyster, clam-quiet and busy —Rumer Godden

An author introduced to people who have read, or who say they have read his books, always feels like a man taken for the first time to be shown to his future wife’s relations —Jerome K. Jerome

An author is like a baker; it is for him to make the sweets, and others to buy and enjoy them —Leigh Hunt

Authors are like cattle going to a fair: those of the same field can never move on without butting one another —Walter Savage Landor

Authors, like coins, grow dear as they grow old; it is the rust we value, not the gold —Alexander Pope

An author who speaks of his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children —Benjamin Disraeli

Being an author is like treading water in the middle of the ocean; you can never stop, you can never stop treading water —Delmore Schwartz

Being a writer in a library is rather like being a eunuch in a harem —John Braine, New York Times, Oct. 7, 1961

A biographer is like a contractor who builds roads: it’s terribly messy, mud everywhere, and when you get done, people travel over the road at a fast clip —Arthur Wilson

Churn out books as though his days were numbered —Michiko Kakutani, New York Times, February 14, 1987

In reviewing Anthony Burgess’ autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God, Kakutani uses this simile to introduce her recounting the story of how Burgess began writing when he thought that his days were in fact numbered.

Clear writers, like fountains, do not seem so deep as they are —Walter Savage Landor

The simile is followed by this about the less-than-clear: “The turbid look the most profound.”

A collection of essays is a collection of variations —Elizabeth Hardwick

The essayist is kind of poet in prose —Alexander Smith

Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast —Logan Pearsall Smith

For the blocked or hesitant, the advent of the computer is like the advent of spring: the frozen river surges, the hard earth flowers —Edward Mendelson reporting on computers for writers, Yale Review, 1985

Getting a book published without a literary agent is like swimming dangerous waters without a shark repellent —Rae Lawrence, New York Times Magazine, July 5, 1987

Lawrence’s simile serves to introduce her experience in finding and choosing a literary agent for her first novel.

Good writing is a kind of skating which carries off the performer where he would not go —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Grammar is an art. Style is a gift. You are born with your style, just as you are born with your voice —Anatole France

The great writer finds style as the mystic finds God, in his own soul —Havelock Ellis

Hiring someone to write your autobiography is like hiring someone to take a bath for you —Mae West, quoted in Bookviews, February 11, 1977

I can get a kind of tension when I’m writing a short story [as compared to a novel], like I’m pulling on a rope and know where the rope is attached —Alice Munro, quoted New York Times Book Review, September 14, 1986

I get a thing I call sentence-fever that must be like buck-fever; it’s a sort of intense literary self-consciousness that comes when I try to force myself —F. Scott Fitzgerald

(I enjoy the hell out of writing because) it’s [writing] like an Easter egg hunt. Here’s 50 pages and you say, “Oh, Christ, where is it? Then on the 51st page, it’ll work” —John D. MacDonald

Like thrifty French cooks, waste nothing —Leslie Garis, New York Times Magazine, February 8, 1987

Garis used the simile to describe Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne’s extensive note taking.

A long preface to a short treatise is like a high hat crowning a low brow —Zevi Hirsh Somerhausen

Paraphrased for more modern English usage from “Like a high hat crowning a low brow is a long preface to a short treatise.”

Long sentences in a short composition are like large rooms in little houses —William Shenstone

Method in writing is like ceremony in living too often used to supply the want of better things —Thomas Killigrew

Minor characters [in scripts] are rather like knights in chess: limited in movement, but handy in their capacity for quick turns, for fixing situations —John Fowles

A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because the door opens —John Updike

Nobody can write a real drama who hasn’t smelled the grease paint; it’s like somebody composing who’s never played an instrument —Mary McCarthy

Novels, like human beings, usually have their beginnings in the dark —Rita Mae Brown

People who write books take as much punishment as prizefighters —Norman Mailer

A pin has as much head as some authors and a great deal more point —George D. Prentice

The profession of book-writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business —John Steinbeck

The profession of writing is wrong, like smoking cigarettes, bad for your health, a diminisher of life expectancy —William Saroyan

Prose as smooth and burnished as well-oiled furniture —A. R. Gurney Jr., New York Times Book Review, 1985

The author of this smooth prose is Louis Auchincloss.

Prose consists of … phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house —George Orwell

Prose is like music, every word must be placed for sound, color and nuance —James G. Huneker

A sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end —Henry David Thoreau

Sometimes writing a recipe takes me a whole day … to communicate it correctly. It’s like writing a little short story —Julia Childs

To inclose him (a fictional character) as irradiantly as amber does the fly and yet the while to preserve every detail of his being has, of all tasks, ever been the dearest to me —Stefan Zweig

In his foreword to a collection of stories and novelettes, Zweig used this simile to explain that he considers his short fiction as much an accomplishment as his more “spacious” works.

Typing your own manuscript for submission is a lot like dressing to see that old lover who left you five years ago —Ira Wood

In his novel, The Kitchen Man, Wood expands the simile as follows: “Ready to walk out the door you stop one last time at the mirror, just to be sure they’re going to regret what they walked out on. Well, maybe the belt is wrong, you think, throwing it on the bed, pulling out another. No, these old shoes won’t do, too dowdy. After an hour, you’re stripped to your socks and in tears, absolutely sure now that you are the perfect mess they said you were. And so your manuscript will be if you don’t fight every urge to better every sentence.”

A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one —Thomas Carlyle

Words flowed from his pen like sparkling spring water —Yoko Ono, about husband John Lennon’s writing

A writer may take to long words, as young men to beards, to impress —F. L. Lucas

Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders —Walter Bagehot

The writer’s work is a little like handwriting. It comes out to be you no matter what you do —John Updike, New York Times, January 18, 1987

The writer who draws his material from a book is like one who borrows money only to lend it —Kahlil Gibran

Writes like a comrade, the kind of friend with whom it is a pleasure to dispute —Jacques Barzun about H. W. Fowler, the author of Modern English Usage, New York Times Book Review, December 12, 1986

Reviewer John Gross in his turn applied the simile to Barzun’s book, A Word Or Two Before You Go.

Writing a first draft is like groping one’s way into a pitch dark room, or overhearing a faint conversation, or telling a joke whose punchline you’ve forgotten —Ted Solotaroff

Writing for a newspaper is like running a revolutionary war; you go into battle not when you are ready but when action offers itself —Norman Mailer

Writing for him was as hard work as catching fleas —Ivan Turgenev

Writing is akin to fortunetelling … you look into someone’s life, read where they have been and predict what will happen to them —Marcia Norman, quoted New York Times Book Review, May 24, 1987

Writing is like building a house —Ellen Gilchrist

Writing is like pulling the trigger of a gun: if you are not loaded, nothing happens —Henry Seidel

Writing is like religion. Every man who feels the call must work out his own salvation —George Horace Lorimer

Writing is like serving a jail sentence, you’re not free until you’ve done time on the rock-heap —Paul Theroux

Writing is like writing a check … it’s easy to write a check if you have enough money in the bank, and writing comes more easily if you have something to say —Sholem Asch

Writing … it is rather like building a house, every separate word is another brick laid into place, cemented to its fellows, and gradually you begin to see the wall beginning to rise, and you know that the rooms inside will take their shape as you intended —Vita Sackville-West

Writing without publishing gets to be like loving someone from afar, delicious for fantasies but thin gruel for a living —Ted Solotaroff

Wrote not without puzzlements and travail, nevertheless as naturally as birds —Cynthia Ozick

You become a good writer just as you become a good joiner: by planing down your sentences —Anatole France

Your article should be like a lady’s skirt: long enough to cover the essentials, and short enough to be interesting —editorial advice to free lancers, PhotoGraphic, January 1987

writing - the work of a writer; anything expressed in letters of the alphabet (especially when considered from the point of view of style and effect); "the writing in her novels is excellent"; "that editorial was a fine piece of writing"

plagiarism - a piece of writing that has been copied from someone else and is presented as being your own work

transcript - something that has been transcribed; a written record (usually typewritten) of dictated or recorded speech; "he read a transcript of the interrogation"; "you can obtain a transcript of this radio program by sending a self-addressed envelope to the station"

3.

writing - (usually plural) the collected work of an author; "the idea occurs with increasing frequency in Hemingway's writings"

body of work, oeuvre, work - the total output of a writer or artist (or a substantial part of it); "he studied the entire Wagnerian oeuvre"; "Picasso's work can be divided into periods"

writing - letters or symbols that are written or imprinted on a surface to represent the sounds or words of a language; "he turned the paper over so the writing wouldn't show"; "the doctor's writing was illegible"

Quotations"Writing, at its best, is a lonely life" [Ernest Hemingway speech, accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature]"I think writing does come out of a deep well of loneliness and a desire to fill some kind of gap" [Jay McInerney]"Would you not like to try all sorts of lives - one is so very small - but that is the satisfaction of writing - one can impersonate so many people" [Katherine Mansfield letter]

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